Why has CBS developed a penchant for censorship?

CBS News put its disturbing love for censorship on display this weekend on its two premiere programs, Face the Nation and 60 Minutes. The network offered a preview of the affection the authoritarian left is likely to exercise during the next four years for just shutting up everyone they disagree with at the point of the bayonet.

When J.D. Vance took the stage in Munich to offer a calculated and well-crafted critique of our European allies for their betrayal of shared Western values of free speech, he had to expect there would be a response. He could hardly have predicted that this response would come from the Tiffany Network, which used his denunciations — of Germanic anti-speech online jackbootery, of the United Kingdom targeting quiet prayer on streets and in homes, and of the cancellation of elections in Romania — as a justification for suggesting the vice president was welcoming another holocaust.

Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan played the aggressive pro-censorship idiot in this moment, displaying her historical ignorance, or willingness to lie about history, in a scattered, bizarre line of questioning to secretary of state Marco Rubio. Brennan never would have gotten the Face job except for a dumb moves at a news network rife with dumb movers (required note on allegiances: I worked at CBS as a contributor at the time of her ascension, and the previous Face the Nation host John Dickerson performed the marriage ceremony between my wife and I). But this was a classic from the woman who cut J.D. Vance’s mic mid-debate: a defense of the holy sepulchre of the rules-based international order against all enemies, foreign and domestic, but particularly domestic, and particularly conservative.

No matter that it was under Joe Biden’s watch that Ukraine never received the needed military equipment that would have made it a harder target for the Russians, or that the Blob slow-walked their support for the nation in ways that created the environment for a longer war, or that Biden himself permitted vocally the prospect of a “minor incursion.” No, it’s the Republicans who must be bad.

Rubio responded, to his credit, by questioning the premise of the question — but he could have gone much further and more aggressive in his response, given the duplicitous and ahistorical nature of Brennan’s conjecture that it was only Germany’s loyalty to principles of free speech that led to the slaughter of millions of Jews. What utter bunk.

And as if the network, already facing a lawsuit from the current president over its editorially adjusted interview with Kamala Harris (and likely headed toward a settlement, given owner Shari Redstone’s eagerness to finalize a merger deal), had not had enough in the way of viewer insulting balderdash for the day, 60 Minutes took time out for thirteen minutes of propagandistic boosting of the German censorship program itself. They practically cheered for the installation of a “Germanic order” to the internet in the form of censors scouting out insults, memes and offensive postings for heavy criminal punishment. There was no alternate view presented, no interview with an unfairly impacted individual — there was only praise for an agenda that is designed by intent to silence, threaten, and destroy those who express views at odds with what the government believes.

Walter Cronkite’s iconic sign off was “That’s the way it is.” Today, for the decrepit media that has lost so much power during the rise of podcasts and social media, that phrase takes on a new insistent nature — that it is incumbent upon them to determine reality, to frame it and focus it, to discard things they wish were not so, and to create it as an ever increasing understanding bequeathed to lesser people for them to gain understanding. Nothing that exists outside of this reality can be allowed. 

Thankfully, the most weaponry they can now marshal in this regard is a decaying news network full of unlikable hosts and a plethora of NGOs whose bottom lines are now absent their essential needed funding from USAID.